Modo-Culture and the Vitalizing Complex: Bollywood F ilms and Globalization Extract from article in

S u jay S O O D (The Boston Conservatory, Boston, USA)

I would like to address the issue of globalization and Indian culture through a discussion of recent Bollywood cinema. Extricating words and phrases in English from some of the top grossing films of the 21st-century in India, and treating them as mythological signs, I will discuss their relevance t o the infiltration of the techno-corporate culture of globalization in India. In counterpoint, I will also highlight elements of traditional Indian culture in the same films. Subsequently, I will discuss cultural constructs in these films as representative of modo-culture, a term I use for designating formations that are combinatory, current and in flux. Here, I will discuss the pitfalls of the prevalent critical terms such as hybridity and interstitial insofar as they are employed to describe cultural constructs. What is really new in globalization? To limit the scope of my argument, I will analyze three films, each of which is representative of a particular genre in popular cinema (horror, romantic comedy, family drama).

The root of the word heritage traces back to the Latin heres for heir, and this suggests the generational transmission of genetic traits. In the context of globalization, it might be apposite to point out that heres traces back to the Sanskrit root gh, which signifies to release, to let go. What in the word heritage suggests a preservation of traits, then, also contains a sense of dischargebut let us not linger on this Derridean opportunity. In the context of 21st-century global networks and the vast ranging discussions on globalization, I find it instructive that Indo-European roots comprise an ancient, extant, and mutative

Sujay SOOD information network. As suggested by the word root, this particular network has a source and a provenance, yet it is the planetary dispersion of its units (words) that is of relevance to cultural formations and mutations. Mark Posters characterization of the digital Net as an amorphous, myriad constellation of ever-changing locations and facilities that are subject to fundamental alteration by anonymous, undesignated, unsalaried, and unauthorized users (320), aptly addresses the nature of this oldest of information networks, language. Age-old language or New-age internet: is there truly a semiotic difference between the two in the realm of signification, appropriation, and alteration/mutation? Pursuing this tackhow new is the new?I would like to address very briefly what it is in the constitution and cultural impact of present-day globalization that is truly new. In their much-debated work Empire, Hardt & Negri deploy the eponymous term to suggest a decentred realm of power that manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command (xiii). While the lexicon employed by Hardt & Negri is trendy and befits the postmodern scene of deterritorialized flows, their neo-Marxist predisposition limits their investigation to modernist concepts that are, properly speaking, unable to imagine the repercussions of cybernetic culture. Mark Poster has taken Hardt & Negri to task for their slip-shod and unexamined use of terms such as high-tech and virtual, an oversight on their part that diffuses the possibility of unprejudiced appraisal: [their] analysis misses precisely what is new about networked digital information systems: the human (labour) is connected with the information machine in a manner that disrupts the subject/object binary and calls for new categories of thought (325). There is much excitement at the dawn of the new millennium about investigating current globalization trends as representative of something really new, that challenge and even surpass the potentialities of the post-enlightenment subject. There is excitement also with regard to the much hyped flows (information, capital, human, cultural, technological) that are supposedly making the disciplinary organization of resources and the techniques that maximize their utility obsolete; indeed, the death-knell sounds with much enthusiasm for that organization called the Nation State. Homi 2

M odo-cult ure and t he vit aliz ing comp lex Bhabha cautions against the heady positivism in Hardt & Negris contention that the globalized nomad is emblematic of a struggle against the slavery of belonging to a nation, an identity, and a people (361), pointing out that such global itinerancy is available to a minority whose very condition of possibility is the sedentary nationals whose residential status accedes to such humdrum systems as international and intra-national laws, taxation, public services, and, not least, franchise in all senses of the word:
Migrants, refugees, and nomads dont merely circulate. They need to settle, claim asylum or nationality, demand housing and education, assert their economic and cultural rights, and come to be legally represented within legal jurisdictions...Monetary policy and taxation rather than markets and financial flows provide the crucial infrastructure for enabling an ethic of free movement. (Bhabha 347)

Bhabhas admonition to those who champion what I would like to call the globo-nomad is salutary. However, the question of newness is re-engaged: what is truly new about the cultural flows across the planet today? Granted, the technology is new, and the information super-highway is new, and in tandem these two collapse time and space such that proximity and distance between subjects are experiences in collapsing relativity. This new condition of being prompts Poster to coin the term humachine, to designate not a prosthesis but an intimate mixing of human and machine that constitutes an interface outside the subject/object binary (318). In the interests of global exposure, one is tempted to ask whether this kind of interface is really new enough to deserve a cyborg portmanteau. The kind of subjectivity that proves inadequate to account for the experiential dimension of global flows is one premised in Western metaphysics. In Eastern thinking, subject formation has never been atomic or individual but relational and contextual. The attributes of the subject, or, more properly speaking, the self, are never apprehended in terms of a static determination. To the contrary, the self is always provisional, constituted at the intersection of familial, social, economic, and political flows. In The 3

Sujay SOOD Geography of Thought, a data-based study motivated by innocuousseeming questions such as Why do East Asians find it so difficult to disentangle an object from its surroundings? and Why do Western infants learn nouns more rapidly than verbs, when it is the other way around in East Asia? Richard E. Nisbett makes a highly provocative case for how and why Asians and Westerners think differently.
The [Asian] person always exists within settingsin particular situations where there are particular people with whom one has relationships of a particular kindand the notion that there can be attributes or actions that are not conditioned on social circumstances is foreign to the Asian mentality...To the Westerner, it makes sense to speak of a person as having attributes that are independent of circumstances or particular personal relations. This selfthis bounded, impermeable free agentcan move from group to group and setting to setting without significant alteration. But for the Easterner...the person is connected, fluid, and conditional. (50)

A substitution of Eastern/Asian and Westerner with nomad and subject respectively makes for an uncanny revelationis the (globo)nomad merely the return of the repressed for the Western subject? The Easterner is certainly not new on the global scene, yet the Eastern attributes bear affinity with the newly emergent nomad of globalization. Once again, we really havent hit on what is new about globalization. If one accepts the idea that the encounter with newness is the site of a fear, then one can argue that the fear and anger with regard to the de-culturizing processes of multinational capitalism, clearly expressed in various parts of the world, point to the newness of the globalizing process. But where does this fear really stem from? Consider that the heroic acts of Jos Bov, who in 1999 led a group in Millau, France to raze a MacDonalds that was under construction, led Allain Rollat of the daily Le Monde declaration: Resistance to the hegemonic pretenses of the hamburger is, above all, a cultural imperative (Bhagvati 107). Clearly, the French are fearful 4

M odo-cult ure and t he vit aliz ing comp lex and regard as threatening the inexorable infiltration of American cultural products and the concomitant invasion of the English language. However, the French reaction doesnt signal anything properly new in the process of globalization. The experience of cultural threat as typified by Jos Bov signifies the age old conflict between the conception of ones world being unitary, singular and (as is often the delusion) central, and the arrival of ontological, epistemological, linguistic, racial and political difference in the form of a visitationpeaceful or violentof another culture and people. Such contact and conflict has been the norm in the history of the world, and has always created cultural and territorial displacement. This is best exemplified by the life of Herodotus, whose perception of a shifting oikoumene, or world as home, led him to compose the inquiring narratives that would form the founding acts of historiography and of the narrative genre of history (Kadir 3). In addressing the issue of cultural essentialism versus globalization, Djelal Kadir traces this repetitive historical incidentupheaval in the homogeneity of a complacent peopleback to the Battle of Marathon in 490 B.C., where in victorious aftermath Greek culture felt justified to differentiate itself from the non-Greek in self-privileging ways that forged what has proved to be the template for a primal scene of identity politics (4). Identity is contingent upon the ontology of the self, and I have argued elsewhere that Eastern thinking (esp. Indian) eschews that of the Self/Other in favour of a self/Self universalism.1 When Poster, Hardt & Negri and all address concepts such as the subject, subjectivity, and the subject/object binary, they situate themselves in a Western ontology. From this situation, they see the flows of globalization disrupting and denying selfhood any objective permanence; the traditional (Western) subject is no longer possible. In contrast, the flows of globalization cannot create similar disruption to fluid and conditional (Eastern) selfhood. At the risk of going out on a limb, I would like to assert that whereas the dubious viability of the Western subject in the era of globalization is experienced as a threat, the
1

See Sujay Sood. An Introduction to Dharmic-Ethics, in Towards a Transcultural Future: Literature and Society in a Post-Colonial World. Eds. Geoffrey V. Davis & Peter H. Mardsen. Rodopi: Amsterdam/New York, NY 2004, XVI: 65-74

Sujay SOOD Eastern self is predisposed to contextualizing the flows of globalization. In the context of the flows and fluidity, it is instructive that Arjuns Appadurais provocative five-fold model to account for the culltural logic of globalization as well as its disjuncturesethnoscapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, mediascapes, ideoscapesemploys the concept of scapes to forefront their perspectival nature:
These are not objectively given relations which look the same from every angle of vision, but rather...they are deeply perspectival constructs, inflicted very much by the historical, linguistic and political situatedness of different sorts of actors: nation-states, multinationals, diasporic communities, as well as sub-national groupings and movements. (296)

While the demarcation between these scapes might be somewhat arbitrary, Appadurais scheme allows one to understand the various occasions for anxiety that are generated by their serpentine and contingent weave. The mobile socius he pinpoints consists of itinerant and migrant peoples who symbolize the difficulty of maintaining a modicum of locality in its traditional sense; the production of the local today is beholden to the dynamics of increasingly more powerful virtual communities. The evanescence of locality is the cause of a fear or anxiety for the subject as citizen, but one must keep in mind that the citizen is one of the worldwide legacies of Western colonization. As a subject formation, the citizen might well be ubiquitous; however, it would be a mistake to extrapolate from it the constitutive characteristics of the (especially, non-Western) Self. In the case of India and Indian self-definition, social theorist Ashis Nandys claim, in the context of postcolonialism, holds relevance to the Indian experience of globalization as well. Nandy cautions against the predominantly Western bias informing most if not all of postcolonial discourse by turning to the "non-modern" tradition of ethnic universalism that has remained vibrant before, during, and after the experience of Imperial colonization. India, Nandy emphasizes, is not "non-West; it is India." Granting the transformation that "mimics' Western structures and attitudes, Nandy reminds us that this 6

M odo-cult ure and t he vit aliz ing comp lex "modern" section of India is a small minority compared to the "ordinary Indian [who] has no reason to see himself as a counterplayer or an antithesis of the Western man" (73). Nandy claims that the precolonial India has neither been lost nor repressed but has always existed in its own peculiar indigenous fashion of accommodation and adjustment:
This is the underside of non-modern India's ethnic universalism. it is a universalism which takes into account the colonial experience, including the immense suffering colonialism brought, and builds out of it a maturer, more contemporary, more self-critical version of Indian traditions...India has tried to capture the differential of the West within its own cultural domain, not merely on the basis of a view of the West as politically intrusive or as culturally inferior, but as a subculture meaningful in itself, though not all-important in the Indian context. (75-76)

One can similarly account for globalization as it affects Indian selfconstitution. While the invasion of technology, information and commodities are certainly transforming the lifestyle of Indians, rural and urban, and even impacting cultural desire, there is a sense of being Indian that persists. If Indian selfhood is premised on the kind of Eastern ontology I have discussed above, then the process of acclimatization by the Indian self is going to be the same in the face of invasions, be they of the 19th-century colonizing variety or the 20thand 21st-century globalizing one. This claim is best exemplified in the recent mainstream films being produced in India. Specifically, I would like to focus on the genre of films that is called Bollywood. As the name suggests, this genre reflects characteristics of its Western globalizing counterpart Hollywood, though in much more modest a financial scale. A hundred million dollar Hollywood film could easily finance the production of 50 extravagantly budgeted Bollywood films. Financial scale aside, both industries share the following features: they are mainstream; revenue potential takes precedence over artistic experimentation; the stories are

Sujay SOOD formulaic with predictable plot structures; one language dominates in each industry (Hindi in Bollywood); both industries are the mecca of mega-stardom; both have histories, past and present, with the underworld/mafia; their films reinforce mainstream morality; the goings-on within this industry are the prime source for tabloids; its stars have significant political potentialthe list goes on. The Hindi films of 21st-century Bollywood are being increasingly infiltrated by phrases in English. These phrases are part of a global currency in the economy of desire and as signs in English are best analyzed as mythical forms, a second order semiotic signifier that operates in the system of myth: We now know that the signifier can be looked at, in myth, from two points of view: as the final term of the linguistic system, or as the first term of the mythical system. We therefore need two names. On the plane of language, that is, as the final term of the first system, I shall call the signifier: meaning...On the plane of myth, I shall call it: form (Barthes 13). their signification characterizes an accommodative aspect of the present-day Indian self. I have chosen to investigate the medium of film as the production, transmission, and reception of its text comprise an economy of entertainment in which the interplay between tradition and modernity reflects a very current state of cultural desire. The films I discuss below have performed well at the box officeI assume, therefore, that these films have found receptive audiences because they cater to their audiences desire for wish-fulfilment. The goal here is to discover not only to what extent this desire has been globalized, and nor simply to what extent it is expressed through cultural forms that are rooted in traditional Indian values, but to locate and analyze forms that represent the coeval nature of the global and the local . I would like to call such forms the vitalizing complex of contemporary culture. It is my overarching argument that the successful Bollywood films of the present century all demonstrate instances of this vitalizing complex. These formations should not be categorized as being hybrid, nor are they interstitial formations. The former term suggests a recombination that is properly speaking genetic, and thus coded with atavistic and predetermined traits that are inextricable in the life of an organism, and have long lasting consequences in the life of the species. As such, the term hybrid in the context of cultural 8

M odo-cult ure and t he vit aliz ing comp lex formations is as misleading and insidious as the application of the term social Darwinism has been in the recent history of Imperial colonization. In cultural discourse, Homi Bhabha has employed the term hybridity to signify the sneaky empowerment of practices and knowledges that are putatively subjugated by the colonizing power. Emphasizing the point that power is never as totalizing as the powerful might want it to be, Bhabha tells us that Hybridity is a problematic of colonial representation and individuation that reverses the effects of colonialist disavowal, so that other denied knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authorityits rules of recognition (Bhabha 114). Bhabhas hybridity model makes sense if culture is located in a colonial epistemology where the colonial Selfbounded and coherent without regard to contextcan be convinced of its own hallucination of dominance. When Bhabha signals his shift from the epistemological to the enunciative (177-78) and states that his purpose in specifying the enunciative present in the articulation of culture is to provide a process by which objectified others maybe turned into subjects of their history and experience (178), his implicit presumption is that the objectified others also define themselves within a Western/colonial epistemology. This presumption is problematic, given that the non-Western Self is characterized by provisional and contextual determination (discussed above). My investigation doesnt purport to present a dissection of Bollywood films premised on post-structuralist verse and (re)versals. I would like to propose that the cultural space presented in these films is not so much a third spacewhere the negotiation of incommensurable differences creates a tension peculiar to borderline existences (Bhabha 218), as it is a mainstream space of conflicting and convivial signs, where drawing borderlines signifies only the vestigial desire of colonial enterprise. Furthermore, our nomenclature for cultural formations should not be derived from the lexicon of natural determinants. I would make a similar case for the term interstitial; while its derivation is more innocent (Latin sistere: to come to a stand), it too hearkens to the domain of biology (referring to fibrous tissue in medical parlance). Therefore, I suggest the term modo-culture (Latin modo: just now) as a label that would more accurately describe cultural formations that are visible from the 9

Sujay SOOD complex (from Latin plectere: to braid) interplay characteristic of the current state of global culture. It might be safely asserted that the cultural impact of globalization is associated with a sense of loss of tradition, values, and identity; however, in bringing attention to the vitalizing complex, I would like to address cultural forms which are determined not by an either/or but by a both/and logic. The signification of the modo-cultural forms in Bollywood films suggests that desire inhabits a cultural space that is combinatory and complex, and vital in the sense that it is not marked by the wholesale erasure of tradition. T H E H O RRO R F I L M Lets get a divorce, says Sanjana in Raaz (2002), in the crisply unaccented English spoken by those brought up in privilege in India the privilege of having consumer access to products of the institutions of global capitalization. These products include but are not limited to education in an English medium school, exposure to a Western lifestyle, security in the provisions of a secular constitution, travails of an urbanite marriage. One may go further and say that Sanjanas cool headed, reasonable sounding statement, lets get a divorce, casts her as a hero of the Enlightenment narrative a hero expecting consensus between the sender (Sanjana herself) and addressee (husband Aditya) since the statement (lets get a divorce) is cast in terms of a possible unanimity between rational minds (Lyotard 999). Sanjana is the idle wife of a moneyed husband whose family owns an international chain of hotels. Shes a modernized woman whom we first see in high heels and a low cut dress, sitting by herself at a table in a night-club blaring Indianized techno. Pills constitute another significative form for the modernized aspect of Indian culture. Sanjana is shown as addicted to pills tranquillizers or sleeping pills, the distinction is blurry and her dependence becomes a point of contention with Aditya as the film progresses. The recurrence of the psychotropic pills ties in with the theme of psychological disorder that is central to this film about being haunted and being possessed. Indeed, the opening sequence of the film recounts the fatal possession of a college girl by the ghost that will soon come to haunt Sanjana, and in the process establishes the

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M odo-cult ure and t he vit aliz ing comp lex institutions of the modern hospital asylum and even the modern-day specialist of paranormal behaviour in the person of Professor Agni. So much for the entrapments of modernity in Raaz. The question of the moment is: where lies the box-office appeal for this Bollywood food film that borrows shamelessly from Robert Zemeckiss Hollywood film What Lies Beneath? It is here that one must turn to the a form whose signification addresses traditional Indian cultural formation: the virtuous Bharatiya nari (Indian woman) who performs her duty as pati vrata (husband sworn). Both the Hollywood and the Bollywood films converge on the plot of a wife discovering that her husband had a short-term affair with a woman whom he then murdered; the films diverge significantly, however, in terms of how the wife responds to this knowledge. In What Lies Beneath, wife Claire refuses to condone her husbands infidelity; In Raaz, however, the discovery of Adityas affair prompts only short-lived reproach from Sanjana, who is urged to be a dutiful and forgiving wife (by Professor Agni, among others), and save her Adityas life by getting rid of the murderous ghost of Malini, the woman/lover he murdered and whose body he unceremoniously dumped in the forest. In her search for the hidden truth, we see Sanjana turn to observing traditional Indian rites, complete with a yagnic flame and rice grains. As such, she is performing the type of rites prescribed for the dutiful wife whose wifehood is defined by her vow of eternal devotion to her husband; such a wife is a pati vrata. The pati vrata signifies an entire domain of votive rites (vrata) that are performed in India by Hindu women. But these votive rights are also an intriguing aspect of the empowerment of Hindu women, an entire set of practices that exist along side those reserved for the Brahmanical male priests of Hindu society. Debashish Chakrabarty tells us that it has been generally understood that women perform vrata in conformity with their sense of what constitutes a womans obligatory duty (stridharma) for the maintenance of the highly auspicious state of being married (saubhagya), and for the benefit of their families (2). Chakrabarty discusses the empowering aspects of the vrata rites in a traditional context; in the film Raaz, the ultra-modern Sanjana dips into the reserves of the pati vrata, creating a tantalizing new cultural complex of a woman, or, more properly speaking, of the Indian wife. Sanjanas new form represents a vitalizing complex, one in which there is a 11

Sujay SOOD combinatory newness. T H E RO MANT I C C O ME DY Hum Tum is a romantic comedy whose premise is lifted from one of Hollywoods all time greats, When Harry Met Sally. A film that starts in the present and flashes back to recounts nine years in the lives of its lead couple, is global in setting showing chance encounters taking place in Delhi, Amsterdam, New York, Paris and Bombay. Hum Tums story fittingly begins at Delhis international airport. One of the first statements uttered in this film by its heroine Rhea Prakash is in the idiomatic English of todays jet set global traveler: Im getting late for my flight, Mama. Rheas impatience is due to her mothers insistence on completing the Hindu ritual of prayer and blessingthe aartithat is traditionally performed at the send-off of a loved one on a long journey.2 The aarti is commonplace in every Hindu home across India; that it is being performed in the departure terminal, by a sari-clad mother to a disinterested daughter dressed in Western attire, is humorous. The humour is sustained by the mothers entreaty to her daughter to take prashad (food blessed through prayer) from VaishnoDevi and distribute it to the poor in New York City.3 Rheas family seems aware that poverty exists even in the Western worldthere is no illusion here that Rhea is headed towards any kind of paradise. The aarti and the invocation of the goddess in the international airport present us with a vitalizing complex whose form signifies no significant departure from tradition, and also that the arrival of technoculture (airport, immigration, aircraft) has been successfully accommodated in the cultural complex. The hero of this romantic-comedy is also present in this opening airport scene, and his first words are idiomatic of American English. Im all set, says Karan Kapoor, speaking on his mobile phone to his divorced dad. Then, with irritation to his mother and best friend Mihir who have come to see him off, What is it with you guys, man? Later
2 3

For a brief description of the aarti ritual, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aarti. Vaishno-Devi is an incarnation of the Goddess Durga, and a cave in her name marks one of the holiest sites of pilgrimage in India. That Rheas mother has The Vaishno-Devi shrine is nestled in the Trikuta mountain in the state of Jammu and Kashmir in India.

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M odo-cult ure and t he vit aliz ing comp lex on in the flight, when he finds himself seated next to Rhea, he introduces himself as Bond. James Bond, an embarrassing attempt as it turns out to make her smile, but one that signifies the household familiarity of one of Hollywoods most profitable franchises. Karans introduction also signals his desire to be a playboy, sophisticated in the art of seduction. He makes his intentions for a romantic dalliance clear to Rhea when she opts for coffee instead of tea during the flight: Coffee is a modern girls drink. I am glad you like coffee. I like modern girls. The word modern here is best understood in the lexicon of Indian English, where it signifies a Westernized subject who is associated with a liberal outlook on sex; whereas the traditional girl is expected to be a virgin up until the time she finds herself on her marriage bed, the modern girl can be expected to reciprocate Karans philandering desires. We dont have to wait long to discover which side of the fence Rhea occupies. In their stopover in Amsterdam, a burgeoning amity is cut short when Karan, with impromptu finesse, kisses her smack on the lips. Far from reciprocating his desire, Rhea pronounces Youre sick. You have no respect for women. The couple, now distanced, part at J.F.K. international airport without any commitment to continue their acquaintance. Rhea and Karan do, of course, meet up accidentally over the course of the next nine years, in Central Park in New York six months later, at Rheas wedding in Delhi three years later, and on a train in Paris a couple of years thereafter. Of these meetings, I would like to focus on the depiction of Rheas marriage. Karans mother, whose profession is a wedding organizer, is overwhelmed and understaffed, to the extent that she enlists her reluctant sons help for the upcoming wedding. Karan expresses delightful surprise upon discovering Rhea at the wedding site: No way! Rhea?! Well done, yaar! Youre looking like a girl! referring to the fact that she has grown out her hair. She asks him whats up with his mop-like hair, to which Karan replies, Its my Tom Cruise look...its fashion. Rhea shakes her head in exaggerated frustration and gives him an L sign with her thumb and forefinger. What? asks the uncomprehending Karan. Youre a loser. Says Rhea. At their next meeting, he warms up to asking her if shes having an arranged or a love marriage. Both, she tells him. In a show of sexual frankness that is uncommon in Indian cinema, Karan goes on to ask her if she has been having pre-marital sex with her husband to be: Karan: 13

Sujay SOOD Dont tell me that before your wedding you havent ever... Rhea: What? Karan: Well, you know what I mean...Ding, Dong? Rhea is not insulted nor upset by this queryin response she tells Karan why should I tell you? The ease with which this topic is handled in Hum Tum shows that the film clearly espouses an ethos that is not only liberal and Westernized but also reflects the ethos of the urban young in cities across India. Hum Tum treats two cultural issues connected with the treatment of women in Indiapremarital sex and widowhoodin a way that definitely signals a cultural shift from the repressive mores of the past. The vitalizing complex here takes its positive cue from Western influence, especially the effects of the womens liberation movements seen in USA and Europe in the nineteen sixties and seventies. The wedding ceremony for our liberal, Westernized characters Rhea and Samir is uncompromisingly rooted in Indian tradition. It takes place at a mansion estate, a lavish rental farmhouse, and is attended by affluent city guests, whose mannerisms and clothing suggest upper middle class backgrounds. A traditional pandaal or platform has been erected in the main hall of the mansion, upon which the bridegroom and bride make their vows and walk for seven turns around the ceremonial yagnic fire. The costumes and rituals are purely traditional, including the all-important gesture sanctifying the bond of marriagethe application of sindoor, a bright red powder made of kum-kum, by the groom into the brides hair parting. In Hindu culture, this signifies that the woman is now also a wife. In the film, the ritual ends with a freeze-frame close up of the newly weds, which turns out to be snapshot and as the snapshot recedes, the caption A Kodak Moment appears next to it. This turns out to be a greeting card signed All the best! Karan. We are reminded that even the traditional wedding is part of a vitalizing complex that consists of reified images. Cameras and videos pervade every urban wedding, making the traditional wedding scene also one that is mediated and disseminated as a commodity for consumption.4 The desire for a picture perfect marriagethe Kodak momentand for a brief moment, the
4

I have in mind here Guy Debords dissection of how images commodify culture while reinforcing models that have the weight of capital behind them to become socially dominant. See Debord, Guy, The Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983)

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M odo-cult ure and t he vit aliz ing comp lex newlyweds can partake in the fetishism of celebrity. Karan and Rheas next meeting is on a train in Paris three years later. An effervescent Karan fails to clue in on Rheas sombre demeanour. Karan discovers that Rheas husband Samir died in a car crash only a year into their wedding. Karan takes it upon himself to give the mourning Rhea emotional support and seeks to develop a friendship with her. It is striking that the first scene between them on a new footing contains not a single phrase in English. The register of their talk is serious, and all of Karans Americanized frivolity is put on hold. This shift towards sympathy is clearly detected by Rhea, who remonstrates with him for showing so much sympathy in English: Why cant people just be normal with me? Her reproach signals a tension between the traditional and vitalizing attitude towards widowhood in India. Once again displaying a cultural complex that defies the traditional Hindu view that treats widows as the living dead by forcing them into an ascetic and joyless existence, Hum Tum supports a view towards widowhood that is refreshingly progressive. When the scene shifts to Mumbai three months later, we find Karan trying to set up his best friend Mihir to marry Rhea. In an amusing tte a tte in which Karan and Rhea playact an arranged marriage compatibility discussion, Karan shakes her out of her self-pity, cajoling her to have fun: It is funny. It is fun. Remember fun? In the mock interview, they find themselves to be highly compatible (as one might expect), and take turns exclaiming, thats a perfect answer. Ten on ten. There is the inevitable night in which Karan and Rhea make love. The next day, unable to admit love, Karan feels he has betrayed their friendship and tells Rhea Im sorry. Im really sorry, Rhea, offering to marry her out of a sense of atonement. This pity offer devastates Rhea, who believed their tryst was the natural extension of their love for each other. Heart-broken, she leaves the country and Karan goes chasing soon thereafter, but has no luck in finding her. The movie finally returns to the present, where they reunite with Karan professing at long last, I love you. T H E F AMI L Y D RAMA Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham (K3G) is a family drama that broke all box 15

Sujay SOOD office records in the history of Indian cinema. The title roughly translates as Sadness Sometimes, Sometimes Joy, and the tagline leaves no room for doubt over the thrust of this sumptuously produced melodrama: Its all about loving your parents. The plot of this rather conventional Bollywood fare is generic: Trouble hits the Raichand clan when the elder and adopted son Rahul, much loved, decides to marry Anjali, the daughter of his younger brothers nanny. The patriarch, Yash Raichand, expresses disapproval based solely on class snobbery and he disowns his son. A proud Rahul moves to England with his wife, where ten years later his younger brother Rohan will arrive to set in motion the grand family reconciliation. The film is shot with lavish sets and set locationsfrom the palatial mansion and estate that serves as the Raichand residence, to the choreographed Bollywood dance sequences that take place in Leicester Square and Westminster in London. Location filming also includes Oxford, Cardiff and Blenheim Palace, while for the exotic dream sequences, shooting took place at Fara Fara Beach on the Red Sea, as well as in Egypt with the pyramids.5 The production design is characterized by opulence, which is thrust in generous dollops at the audience, from the Raichand helicopter that brings Rahul home in the opening sequence, to the Lamborghini being driven by Rohan as he cruises into campus to attend his first day at a purported London business school. What makes K3G a superhit with Indian audiences is its reaffirmation of family values in the age of globalization. The entire film can be seen as a seamless vitalizing complex; indeed, combine the vast fortune of the Raichand empire, the global locations, the storyline that takes place in England almost as much as in India, with the unwavering celebration of Indian traditions such as the festival of Diwali, the wives observance of Karvachaut, the rituals of marriage and funeraland one gets an imbrication of the (Indian) old and the (global/Western) new that is celebratory on all fronts. The family turmoil affecting the Raichands is not the result of any exacerbating influence from the effects of globalization but of the unpredictability
5

For a discussion of the films cinematography and the choices made by the Director of Photography, see http://www.kodak.com/US/en/motion/newsletters/inCamera/jan2002/kabhi.shtml

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M odo-cult ure and t he vit aliz ing comp lex of true love. Rahul returns from an international business school to take over the reins of the family business (in true Bollywood style, the audience never knows what this lucrative business is), with a proud and approving Yash annointing him in his office: The Raichand empire belongs to you. It turns out that Yash has also decided which woman will end up belonging to Rahul as his wife, an equally wealthy girl friend, Naina, for whom Rahul has no romantic desire. Instead, he falls head over heels for the lower-class Anjali and, predictably, all hell breaks loose in the Raichand household when he brings her home as his bride. The estranged Rahul is next seen living in London with his wife and 6 year-old son named Krish. It is in the England segment of the film that issues relating to Indian identity come to the fore. Anjali is constantly worried that her son is becoming too British, and is wistful about the fact that he has started calling her mummy instead of ma. Anjalis sister Pooja, who serves as the romantic foil for Rohan, calls herself Poo and is first seen Westernized to a frivolous degree, wearing a garish costume of minis and boots that would likely give any selfrespecting sexworker the blushes, and instructing her square relatives on the niceties of her culture with statements such as [Im] phat...Phat? Pretty hot and tempting! Rohans arrival into their home rekindles in the household a desire for Indian values and customs. Helplessly attracted to Rohan, the tartily dressed Poo transforms herself into a sari-clad Pooja when she is within the orbit of family activityall the while remaining conscious that her new look is a fashionable strategy: Its the Indian look. Its in! she quips in answer to the arched eyebrows of her family members. A brief but significant modo-cultural form is presented to us when Rohan searches the www.friends.com website in a cybercafe to successfully locate his long estranged brothers whereabouts. The background score at this moment is Saare jahan se achcha, a patriotic song extolling the virtues of the land of Hindustan (a.k.a India a.k.a. Bharat) and its multi-religious people.6 We can unbraid the
6

The poem Saare Jahan Se Achcha was composed by the poet Sir Allama Muhammad Iqbal in 1904/1905 while India was under British administration. Iqbal was a lecturer at the Government College, Lahore at that time. He was invited by his favorite student Lala Hardayal to preside over a function. Instead of making a speech, Iqbal sang Saare Jahan Se Achcha with gusto. The poem is in praise of

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Sujay SOOD following elements of the vitalizing complex at work here: the world wide web, the icon par excellence of the 21st-century global village, can be usefully employed in the task of reaffirming familial bonds; Rohan is driven by a traditional sense of kinship to reunite his home (as dutiful son) but is at the same time also completely at home in the world of information technology (as savvy user); the saare jahan se achcha song, which will become the anthem to his quest of reunion, is not invoked politically but sentimentally in the context of the emotional network of familial bond. It is not surprising to see that Indias national anthem also figures in this film in a sentimental sequence where the hymn transcends its putative function of expressing national and political loyalty for the country, to become instead a harmonizing tool between the British and the Indians. Rahuls entire family, Rohan included (who by now has revealed his true identity to everyone but Rahul) go to attend Krishs annual day function at the school lawns. In a nod to racial sensitivity, Anjali complains about the fact that they have, as usual, been placed at a table far back from the stage while their British neighbour seems to have the best seat in the house. Pooja, now dressed in a modest salwar-kameez, admonishes her in a crisply put-on British accent, behave yourself...theres no need to get so hyper. Pooja alludes to the fact that Anjalis makes a spectacle of herself through unbridled emotional display when she sees Krish sing. Regardless, Anjali promises to make at least one wolf-whistle when her son is on stage, much to her familys dismay. The subtext is clearly one of stereotypes: the emotional Indian versus the stiff upper-lipped Briton; everyone except for Anjali wants to blend in with what they perceive to be the British culture. She jumps up, clapping and whistling with irrepressible glee as the M C announces the opening act: Do Re Mi from the Sound of Music, headed by Krish Raichand. When the singing begins, Krish leads the chorus and the band into a rendition of Indias national anthem Jana Gana Mana. The sound of music has never been sweeter for the Raichand family as, bewildered, they stand to attention. As the
Hindustan and preaches harmony between people of separate religious beliefs. Ironically, Iqbal is also credited with being one of the earliest proponents for a separate nation-state in the Muslim majority areas of the sub-continent. For further information, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saare_Jahan_Se_Achcha.

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M odo-cult ure and t he vit aliz ing comp lex anthem progresses, the British audience rise up to their feet, following the lead of none other than Anjalis neighbour. The visual climax of this hyperbolic scene that verges on the maudlin is a close up of a smiling British girl on a wheelchair who, unable to stand up, raises a hand in salute. As for the impact of the climax itself, the phrase melodramatic overkill is by far insufficient. Krishs voice falters at the very last refrain of the anthem, which is taken up by Anjalis strident voice: Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya he. As she runs to the stage to embrace her son, the background score plays yet another patriotic Indian anthem Vande Mataram, and, as she tearfully embraces her son, we have a repeat of the first anthem we heard in the film, Saare jahan se achcha. Anjali and Krish embrace in an unbridled display of affection and emotion, and receive approbatory applause from the entire crowd. One is tempted to read this sequence as a fantastical negotiation of the fear of alienationi.e., the only way in which the Raichands can fit in is by a metaphoric reverse colonization which sees the British stand up to attention on British soil when the Indian national anthem is played. Yet an alternate reading is possible. The sequence can be read as the affirmation of difference by the Indians, the hyphenated Indo-Brits (Pooja, Krish), as well as by the British themselves. It can also be seen as a modo-cultural shift in this films London, whereby the display of emotional excess is no longer frowned upon by the British in their own homeland. The affirmative quality of this sequence implies that the desire to accept is equally strong as the desire to be accepted. It can be argued in this sense that the diasporic lives depicted in K3G surpass the anxieties paradigmatic of earlier Bollywood films depicting the (im)migrant condition of Indians.7 Rahul is in exile from a heart-land more than any territorial homeland, and his desire for return is contingent on paternal reconciliation, which in turn is going to be based on an acceptance. Acceptance becomes the tenor for the remainder of the film, where after many a tearjerker reunion, Rahul is finally accepted back into the Raichand clan by his father. In the final analysis, K3G presents us with a fantasy in which conventional diasporic concerns are negated by sheer weight of
7

For an incisive discussion of paradimatic diasporic films, see Vijay Mishras Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire, Routledge: NY 2002, especially his discussion of Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (pp. 250-258).

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Sujay SOOD capitalthe Raichands own their own jets and helicopters, and physical or territorial displacement lacks any sense of dislocation or permanence. Physical distance means next to nothing for the globetrotting and globalized Raichands.

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M odo-cult ure and t he vit aliz ing comp lex Work s qu ote d: Appadurai, Arjun. Disjuncture and Difference in Global Cultural Economy. Theory, Culture and Society. Vol. 7, 1990: 295-310. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 1984. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Bhabha, Homi. Statement for the Critical Inquiry Board Symposium. Critical Inquiry. Vol. 30 (Winter 2004): 342-349. Chakravarty, Debashis. Vrata: Including the Excluded. http://www.burg-wildenstein.de/BW2002/Vrata.PDF In

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000. Kadir, Djelal. To World, to GlobalizeComparative Literatures Crossroads. Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 41, no. 1, 2004: 19. Nisbett, Richard E. The Geography of Thought. New York: Free Press, 2003. Poster, Mark. The Information Empire. Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 41, No. 3, 2004: 317-334. Filmography: Hum Tum (2004) directed by Kunal Kohli Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham (2002) directed by Karan Johar Khakhee (2003) directed by Rajkumar Santoshi Raaz (2003) directed by Vikram Bhatt

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